A Lienchiang County resident is striving to keep a local language alive through her YouTube channel.
Tsao Chen-ying’s (曹辰瑩) weekly program is teaching people about the eastern Min (閩) language known as Fuzhouhua (福州話), which was long ago one of the daily languages heard on the Matsu Islands. On her channel, she documents her efforts to self-learn the language and leads discussions about Fuzhouhua’s history.
Tsao said that daily conversations on Matsu have been carried out in Mandarin since 1945, when the Chinese Nationalist Party enforced the language until 1987, during the Martial Law era.
Photo: CNA
As a result, elderly people are not likely to speak Fuzhouhua with younger generations, who are less likely to understand it, she said.
While Fuzhouhua originated in the eastern Min region, it underwent changes in pronunciation and vocabulary that make it distinct to Matsu. It is officially listed by the government as the “Matsu [variant of the] Eastern Min Language.”
Tsao said that older generations tend to believe that teaching the language was useless and could lead to the younger generation being ostracized for their accent.
Tsao said that although she grew up on Matsu, she had only understood the language but could not speak it.
Tsao said the inspiration for her program came from her wish to better converse with her grandmother in the language, adding that the COVID-19 period provided a good opportunity to learn the language.
She said that her program sought to convince older people that speaking the language is an act of identifying with the local culture.
Tsao said that one should not learn their native language just because it is offered at school.
Trying to self-learn a language is difficult, she said, but the effort and the mistakes make the language more impressionable, compared with being taught a language in class.
Tsao said she has significantly improved her proficiency, which has positively affected those around her, adding that people she knows are making more efforts to speak the language with her and are realizing that the language has a place in the culture.
An upcoming episode of her program is to feature elementary-school principals discussing their thoughts on the government policy to include teaching Fuzhouhua at schools, she said.
Tzao’s channel can be found on YouTube by searching “掐米亞店.”
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